


distance, timing, breakdowns, fighting! …silence.

by angelica_barnes



Series: ABC [6]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AGAIN I'M REALLY SORRY, AND PLEASE DON'T READ IF ANYTHING MIGHT TRIGGER YOU, Alternate Universe, Angst, Arson, Car Accidents, Consensual Underage Sex, Diseases, Eating Disorders, Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, Heavy Angst, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Multi, Natural Disasters, Non-Explicit, Rape/Non-con Elements, SO SORRY, So I'm really sorry, Sterek is the main pairing, Suicide, THIS IS A VERY SAD STORY AND THERE'S NO HAPPY ENDING, kind of reincarnation, there's also discussion of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 17:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16309991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica_barnes/pseuds/angelica_barnes
Summary: 10 ways derek and stiles could've lived and the 1 way they actually did.6. falling





	distance, timing, breakdowns, fighting! …silence.

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from "Sad, Beautiful, Tragic" by Taylor Swift
> 
> I hope you enjoy. Please don't read if anything triggers you, I want you to be healthy and happy. Thank you!
> 
> Hope you're having an amazing day, and if not, I hope it gets better.
> 
> :)

**I was always meant to**

**love you, I think.**

**But I was never meant to**

**be with you.**

 

**\- MM**

 

**1.**

 

The first time, it happens in high school. Derek is the hot jock that every girl wants to date, but buried underneath all that popularity is the nerd he keeps hidden. There’s a new girl every week, each one claiming to be his girlfriend, but Derek denies it all.

Stiles is the loser jock who never makes it off the bench. The only person who knows he exists is his best friend, Scott, but even he blows Stiles off when his chance comes to date the new mystery kid, Isaac Lahey. Stiles doesn’t date - his father’s the sheriff, for one, and no one wants to date someone like him.

Derek first kisses Stiles behind the bleachers after a Sunday game, and they date for all of three weeks before Stiles breaks it off, spitting that he doesn’t want to be a dirty little secret.

He cries when he gets the phone call that Derek’s leukemia finally caught up to him and he passed away in his sleep.

 

**2.**

 

The second time, Derek is a mute single dad who scrapes by being a janitor at the TD Garden. His daughter, May, is asthmatic and he can’t really afford her any healthcare. But she loves to sing, to stay with him after the shows and climb up onto that wide open stage, to sing in that dying spotlight if only for a moment.

Stiles is the talk-show host comedian who performs at the TD Garden for one week in the fall of an odd year. He laughs, and smiles, and teases, but his words are meaningful and stick to you in a way memories can’t. He wears a wedding ring promising him to fashion designer Lydia Martin but in the end it doesn’t matter.

Derek avoids Stiles and refuses to acknowledge him. Stiles tries and tries, finally confessing that though Derek can’t breathe a word, Stiles knows all he’s ever wanted to say. He kisses Derek silly until the burning cold of his wedding ring fades into just another part of Stiles’ warm soul.

Derek leaves with a quiet smile on his face, half shameful and half pleased, but never makes it home. His car is rammed from the side by Stiles’ limousine, killing him instantly, and the magazines are filled with blurry photos of Stiles crying and screaming as the medics carry Derek’s body away, and then a final photo only taken by one lucky New York Times newbie; a photo of May cradled in Stiles’ arms, a silver wedding ring sparkling against her dark hair.

 

**3.**

 

The third time, Derek is Stiles’ way-way-down-the-street neighbor. They’re both rich assholes who spend their time counting money and courting pretty ladies, and neither is happy. They meet to strike a deal, to split a new set of casinos, and it’s love at first sight.

They spend too much time together, enough they turn into a spectacle, and soon plan to run away from their lonely lives together. Who needs money, they say. Who needs time. All we need is each other.

They become outlaws, too influenced by the crime novels they both write, and end up master thieves, breaking into fifteen vaults around Vegas before moving on to bigger, better things in England.

Derek’s secretary, Kate, follows them there. She creeps into their hotel room one night and lights a candle, knocking it to the floor. It catches on the gasoline trail she’s set, and she smiles cruelly and waits for the screams to start.

It is a massacre. There are no survivors.

 

**4.**

 

The third time, Derek is a homicide detective. He has a wife and kids at home, Braedan and Leeann and Johnny. He’s walking home from the bar on a Friday night when he hears someone crying, and follows the broken sobs into an alleyway. There, he tackles a filthy man off the crying one, leaves him out cold on the wet ground, calls it in and assures the man’s misery with a pair of handcuffs.

Stiles is a prostitute who takes three showers when he gets home each night and then one in the morning, just trying to wash off the sweaty hands that touch him. One guy gets too greedy one night, and traps him up against the wall as Stiles trudges out the back door of the strip club, moaning breathily in Stiles’ ear and pulling on the latter’s hair. Stiles is crying so hard he can barely register the man’s hand being torn from his body.

Derek asks Stiles’ name and offers his own, and Derek walks him home. Stiles is quiet the whole way, only sniffling every now and then, and at his door, Derek writes his number on Stiles’ palm.

Two weeks later, after thirteen calls and a curious absence of one this morning, Derek gets called in at five-thirty to investigate the most recent sloppy murder.

Stiles’ body waits for him, eyes squeezed shut, face contorted in pain, and Derek breaks down as the lab results come back positive for physical abuse and rape at the same time that Derek’s team reaches their last dead end.

 

**5.**

 

The fifth time, Derek is a secret service agent for the President. He’s been working there for eight years and seen one or two things in his day, but never anything he would tell. Agents flit in and out of his life on a daily basis. First Whittemore, heading to Costa Rica to marry famous CEO Lydia Martin; second, McCall, disappearing and showing up three years later on death row as the murderer of Isaac Lahey, Allison Argent, and Kira Yukimura.

Stiles is the First Son. He’s jumpy and outgoing, the kind of flirt that hands out every pick-up line like a gift to be treasured. His fights with his father and random offending citizens are almost more famous than the President himself, but Stiles never seems to notice.

Derek does his best to clamp the desire down, but Stiles is willing and cunning, stealing kisses and smiles with Derek in between the Library of Justice’s shelves. He pretends they’re not doing something illegal, brushing every one of Derek’s voiced concerns off loftily, as if nothing could possibly go wrong. Derek ignores his head and follows his heart, believing him.

The day before Stiles’ eighteenth birthday, they’re caught by the President himself, and no unsuspecting father sprung with  _ that _ is going to listen. Derek is put on trial, and found guilty, despite Stiles’ repeated claims of love for him. He ends up in a jail cell for the next twenty years and Stiles visits every day, until Derek realizes what he’s keeping the boy he loves from.

He kills himself and Stiles is inconsolable, but in the end, manages to convince his father to abolish the death penalty, creates kinder and better prisons, proves Scott McCall innocent, and marries a CIA agent named Malia Tate.

He still visits Derek’s grave every year, up until his dad dies, and then his acts of defiance end and Derek fades away from everyone’s memories but the dead’s.

 

**6.**

 

The sixth time, Derek is working the midnight shift at a 7-11. He doesn’t speak to anyone who approaches the counter, mainly because no one approaches the counter. Anyone who comes in is only there for the bathroom.

Stiles is a hitchhiker who wanders in to buy Doritos, four poptarts, and 2 bottles of water. He grins as he drops all he’s been struggling to hold next to the cash register and asks brightly if Derek likes Captain America.

Derek says nothing, kind of wanting to strangle the kid, but he doesn’t. That would be rude. Instead he puts all the items in a flimsy plastic bag, avoids Stiles’ eyes and tunes out his ramblings.

Stiles leaves his receipt with his number written on the back in barely readable scribbling. Derek crumples it up, shoves it in his back pocket, and forgets about it, looking up at the clock and wondering how close it is to when he gets to go home.

He wakes up with his head on the counter at five in the morning and the first thing he sees is the television in the corner, broadcasting the news of a bad car accident where eight people have just been injured.

Their names flash across the screen along with the bolder letters spelling out that of the one that died, the one waiting by the side of the road with his thumb sticking out, the one with the spastic grin, the one wearing the Spider-Man t-shirt, the one whose last written confession is torn in Derek’s pocket.

 

**7.**

 

The seventh time, Derek is a guy who works out at the gym constantly, has an eating disorder and lives off coffee from the cafe down the street. He’s gay and won’t tell his girlfriend that, and he kisses the barista in the backroom whenever things get too much and he just wants to forget.

Stiles is a barista. He’s out and proud and studies law at Harvard, but doesn’t advertise it. He draws smiley-faces on his jeans and infinity symbols on the insides of his wrists and kisses Derek in between bouts of breath where he breathlessly gasps that he thinks Derek’s beautiful.

Derek faints in the middle of the cafe when placing his order, Stiles screams, someone calls 911, and Derek ends up in a hospital that tries to force food down his throat.

But he won’t eat, and so his hand goes limp in Stiles’ after ten days, rasping his last three words solely to ease the pain in pleading amber eyes.

 

**8.**

 

The eighth time, Derek is a recluse scientist and writer. He publishes fantasy novels and physics papers, and drinks tea while reading Agatha Christie in his little house up in the forest-blanketed mountains of Vermont.

Stiles is an elementary school teacher who moves down from Quebec to Jericho for his sick mother. He meets Derek in the cereal aisle of the Trader Joe’s and starts lecturing him on the unhealthiness of Fruit Loops. Derek stares, wide-eyed and speechless, but trades them for the cinnamon Life in Stiles’ cart. Stiles shrieks in protest, Derek smiles, and their first kiss is an accident that happens when Derek holds the box above his head and Stiles jumps for it.

They say their first I love you’s after two days, move in together after six weeks, and are engaged after three months. Derek’s hiking on the morning of the day before their wedding, and Stiles is at school, wrapping up some last minute meetings.

The ground rumbles, Derek runs, and is buried in ice and snow fifteen feet deep. Stiles finds out when he gets home to an empty house and a panicked voicemail from Derek, breaths slower and more desperate by the second.

They never find his body, and so Stiles never gets to say goodbye.

 

**9.**

 

The ninth time, Derek is a waiter at an Applebee’s. It’s boring and he hates it, but what can you do? He lives in a tiny apartment in lower east Texas and wishes on every star, ladybug, eyelash and eleven-eleven there is.

Stiles is the bartender at the Chiles’ across the street. He loves his job, listening to people’s woes and fixing them for the night. He waits for Derek to come through those doors every Thursday, with a smile and a margarita at the ready.

Stiles stares at Derek’s lips as they move when he speaks, but he never gets to taste them. He slips his number into Derek’s hand as the man leaves sixty Thursdays after the first, relishing the feeling of Derek’s fingertips brushing against his.

Derek calls him on the way home, says his name, and then a curse word in a raised falsetto and Stiles screams as he hears a crash, ragged breathing, and then silence.

 

**10.**

 

The tenth time, Derek is a famous ballet dancer. He stars in The Nutcracker in Boston almost every year while on his Christmas break from Julliard. Critics rave about him, about how he’s really made his dreams come true. Derek snickers and traces the framed awards with his bandaged fingers whenever he reads the reviews, because his dream was always to box before he found out he couldn’t stomach hitting someone else for no reason.

Stiles is the owner of an ice cream shop downtown. His two roommates, Malia and Kira, are engaged and his favorite customers are the two runaway members of a biker gang, Erica and Boyd. He greets everyone with a smile and rides his bike down the silent streets at ten at night to get home.

He wipes out to avoid a tree and crashes straight into Derek, who laughs it off and smiles, offering to walk Stiles home. They go out for coffee and honest flirtation, and link their pinkies when walking down the street. Derek teaches Stiles how to box and Stiles teaches Derek how to do division, and they sleep on a mattress in the middle of the living room of Derek’s apartment.

Derek is performing the battle against the mice in rehearsal when a beam comes crashing down from the ceiling, snapping his ribs and pushing one of them into his heart. He dies in the ambulance choking on his breath and saliva as he whispers Stiles’ name.

Stiles hears his phone ring as he’s crossing the street on his bike, the last stretch home, and looks down at the caller ID just as a car comes barrelling down the road without headlights and slams into his side. He has just enough time to cry out in pain before everything goes black.

He doesn’t wake up again.

  
  
  
  


**1.**

 

The last time, Derek is a werewolf. Stiles is a human. He trepasses on Derek’s private property with his best friend Scott, and they hate each other on sight.

Six years down the road, blood on their hands and innocence flashing in their eyes, they feel something stirring in their hearts and ignore it, mistaking love for fondness.

The last time, it’s friendship that kills them.

  
  


 

 

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed ;) if i forgot to tag something that could be triggering please tell me in the comments and i'll fix it as soon as possible. thank you


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